From The Verge: Asus has revealed new phones from its Zenfone 4 line: the ZenFone 4, ZenFone Max, ZenFone 4 Max Pro, ZenFone 4 Selfie, and ZenFone 4 Selfie Pro. Whew, that’s a mouthful! The models and specs were leaked last week on the Taiwanese company’s French website. The ZenFone 4 and ZenFone 4 Max feature rear dual cameras (which seem to be all the rage this year), while the Selfie models have front dual cameras, which capture photos with a 120-degree angle.

From PC World: OK Google, phone Home. First announced at I/O in May, Google is ready to launch hands-free calling via its voice-activated Home speaker, letting you get in touch with anyone in the U.S. or Canada without lifting a finger—and for free.

From CNET: Qualcomm is aiming to stake a bigger claim in the artificial intelligence world.

The chipmaker announced Wednesday that it's acquiring Scyfer, a Netherlands-based machine learning startup. Scyfer has been working on AI for companies in industries such as manufacturing, health care and finance.

From The Verge: Recent leaks have shown that the Pixel 2 won’t feature a display as impressive as what’s coming on the larger Pixel 2 XL. But a filing that HTC made with the FCC confirms a number of things about the smaller Google-branded smartphone expected to debut sometime in the next couple months. For one, the FCC documentation confirms that HTC is definitely making the thing.

From PC World: On Monday, August 21, Intel plans to unveil its 8th-generation Core processors. But it may have also unveiled one member of its 9th-generation Core family: Ice Lake.

A terse note on the company’s website describes the new technology: “The Ice Lake processor family is a successor to the 8th-generation Intel Core processor family. These processors utilize Intel’s industry-leading 10nm+ process technology.”

From PC Mag: If you go out and buy a low-end, entry-level laptop or desktop PC today, chances are it will have an Intel Apollo Lake processor inside carrying the Celeron or Pentium branding. These are the just good enough, cheap processors that allow for light workloads, web browsing, and long battery life.

The chip generation that follows Apollo Lake is called Gemini Lake, and details about what to expect from these new chips is starting to leak, including a block diagram revealing quite a bit of detail.

From The Verge: Samsung plans to unveil a new fitness smartband, the Gear Fit2 Pro, at the company’s Unpacked event on August 23rd, according to VentureBeat. The latest fitness tracker has added water resistance up to 165 feet, and it can sync to the Speedo On app, which lets you swim with it and track lap times. Samsung’s current smartband, the Gear Fit2, isn’t submersible underwater, so that’s a definite winning point. There’s also a music playback option that allows Spotify tracks to be played offline, as well as GPS functionality.

From CNET: After deciding to do away with the Battle.net name for its gaming service last September, Blizzard is bringing it back again. The gaming company had originally decided to do away with the Battle.net name as it felt "there wasn't as much of a need to maintain a separate identity for what is essentially our networking technology."

But it seems after getting feedback from its user base, the maker of Overwatch and World of Warcraft will be transitioning back to its old name, but it will be henceforth called "Blizzard Battle.net."

From PC World: When Consumer Reports stopped recommending the Microsoft Surface Laptop and latest Microsoft Surface Book, it did so based not on those specific products' reliability. Rather, the company used reliability surveys of earlier Surface devices (including Surface 3, Surface Pro 3, and the early Surface Book), according to a report the publication released Thursday.